Feature of The Week – Keyword Tracker

As anyone involved in local SEO knows, keeping close track of the keywords that drive your business is essential. And as one of the most dynamic aspects of the location-based marketing puzzle, keywords provide an opportunity to continuously monitor your space, your competitors and the relative traction of your venues at the local level. It also gives you immediate feedback on the success or failure of your campaigns, your share of voice (a measure of your keyword dominance relative to the competition), and what hypotheses are resonating with customers in the wild.

This week’s feature is The sweetiQ Keyword Tracker. Designed to help location-based marketers get a clear picture of where they stand in the wily world of local search, this integrated feature brings together a host of capabilities to drive location-based marketing strategy, and monitor success.

Allowing you to track your results to a granular level, the Keyword Tracker gives you clear insight into your organic results, as well as the keywords you’re working towards ranking high in SERPs on a local level dominated by Google Places. Once your locations and keywords are in, the system generates intelligent suggestions and recommendations on keywords particularly relevant to your geographic areas. For example, you may want to know where you stand in the results for “coffee shop” in New York, or “cafe” in Montreal. This tool gives you real results that enable you to take immediate action to ensure that you’re using the right words to get found. Gathering results from Google, and Yahoo!/Bing the tool gives you a complete picture of your local Share of Voice. What’s more you’ll get a snapshot that shows you how much of Page 1 results you control, with your results shown in an easy-to-understand score of 0-100.

Here’s a quick summary of the Keyword Tracker Capabilities

Track organic + Local Keywords

Track Rankings Over Time

Share of Voice ranking with a simple, 0-100 scoring system

True Local Keyword Suggestions

Competitive Information

Google, Bing, Yahoo Results

When it comes to local keyword tracking the name of the game is patience and plenty of experimentation and monitoring. But just as often, it is about seizing opportunities at the right moment. For example, let’s say you are a local pizza place in a location that runs a summer music festival, say “The Montreal Jazz Festival”. While you may not want that keyword all of the time, being particularly useless during the winter, your summer online marketing performance will thank you if you include those keywords in your listings and descriptions. Again experimentation, testing hypothesis and diligent monitoring are key.

As Local Search becomes increasingly critical to venue based businesses and franchises, understanding how to use local keywords can often mean the difference between winning or losing against the competition. The good news is that while location-based marketing is alive and well among the world’s biggest brands and franchises, there is an enormous opportunity for smaller chains and local networks of venues to get into the game, and win in the rankings.

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